The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) at the LinuxCon 2016 announced that it is giving away its 1000 node server community cluster for open source projects. The free availability of the new cluster comes to software developers through Las Vegas-based Super Switch facility.

CNCF has developed the $15 million community cluster to let software developers access its cloud-native technology. It helps initiate large-scale integration testing before releases and provides feasibility as well as scalability to build new experiments. Developers can leverage the free infrastructure to run various scalability and performance tests at once and deploy their software stacks at scale, without spending their precious pennies on some third-party cloud solution.

Although the cluster is available for free, developers need to fulfill some requirements to access its benefits for their projects. CNCF has made it mandatory for programmers to use only open source code on the cluster. Also, they need to test advance cloud-native computing such as containerisation, orchestration or microservices along with some containerised workloads.

“We are already seeing the CNCF taking a lead in bringing communities and companies together to work in an open, collaborative manner. Ultimately this collaboration will benefit everyone using cloud-native technology,” said Fintan Ryan, an industry analyst at RedMonk.

Backed by Intel, the CNCF Community Cluster offers a staged path to let developers first develop and test on a small scale and then gradually move to large-scale testing. There is a range of compute node and storage specifications to suit a variety of developments.